First Round, Second Course of Chemo

On Wednesday the 14th I had the first round of my second course of chemo. So far, it has been much easier to tolerate than the first course. The steroid I take at the beginning of the round wound me up a little, so I had trouble sleeping the night before the treatment, but a Benadryl the next two nights helped me get to sleep without a problem. The steroid also caused a spike in my blood sugar, but I think that should drop now that I’m through taking it this round. No nausea, no particular loss of appetite, and only minimal feelings of being unwell and fatigued. Interestingly, I felt worse today than any day so far. Maybe the damage done by the drug to cancer and normal cells is now affecting the body.


Bottom Line: If this is as bad as it gets, and the drug does slow down the growth of my tumors, I can keep this up through many rounds. I get the next round on January 4.

David

Starting Another Round of Chemotherapy

In late October I wrote a post telling about how my tumors appeared to be growing at a more rapid pace and about the difficulty of knowing what to do in response.  I had by bimonthly imaging on Friday, a CT scan this time, and saw the oncologists today.  The cancer continues to grow more rapidly, so we talked again about possible responses.  The bottom line is that we decided to return to chemotherapy because my first round of chemo appeared to have halted the growth while it lasted and for a few months afterwards.

Last year at this time, I was receiving a combination of pemetrexed and cisplatin.  This time I will be getting pemetrexed alone, and we will monitor to see if it slows down the growth.  Apparently, there has never been a trial of pemetrexed alone, but it is used alone as a second line treatment.  Pemetrexed was introduced as an agent to kill the cancer cells, but Dr. Camidge said that it is seen now to have the effect of keeping cancer in check rather than killing it.  Later, his nurse noted that one patient would be coming in today for her 38^th cycle of pemetrexed therapy.  At three weeks between treatments, that’s over two years of treatment.  I doubt that she is being treated for mesothelioma, and I would be surprised to see mesothelioma turned into a chronic disease by pemetrexed, but it does indicate that the treatment is not so debilitating that it must be stopped even if it is working.

I am very pleased with this plan.  It feels good to be taking action, and I am convinced that this is the best approach to slow down the cancer growth with a minimum dent in my quality of life.  I also see it as a way of living longer in case a good clinical trial opens or an ongoing trial proves successful against mesothelioma.  I’m certainly not looking forward to the treatment, but it will be intellectually interesting to compare my experiences this time with the first round of chemo.  Pemetrexed in generally well tolerated and only takes about 10 minutes to infuse.  I’ll have to avoid contact with sick people during part of the cycle, but it should create only a minimum amount of fatigue and anorexia.  

I’ll post again in probably a couple of week to say how this new round is going.

Thanks again for reading my posts.  It’s rewarding to know that some people find them interesting and perhaps helpful.

David